NTRODUCTION
Divine Surprises
A
farmer every morning went out to feed his chicken. Each
morning, when it saw the farmer approach, the bird got ready
for breakfast. This scenario happened over and over until,
one morning, the farmer arrived and, instead of feeding the fowl,
wrung its neck.
The point is this: The past is no guarantor of the future. Though
things that have happened before, even regularly, can and often do
happen again, they don't, automatically, have to. The unexpected
does arise and often when least expected (which is part of what
makes it unexpected).
This concept was hard for many seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Europeans to grasp. The tremendous advances in science,
particularly through the seminal work of Isaac Newton, led many to
believe that all of nature works through cold, uncaring, and unvary-
ing laws. Once these laws were understood, it was conceivable (if
enough other information were given) that a person could know
everything that would happen in the future because everything—
from what the king would want for dessert on New Year's Eve to the
number of hailstones in the next hailstorm over Paris—could be
predicted with unerring accuracy.
By the early twentieth century, however, scientists like Niels
Bohr, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrodinger—with their discoveries in
quantum physics—brought these deterministic assumptions into great
question. According to quantum theory, reality at its most fundamen-
tal level reveals itself in a transitory, elusive, even statistical, man-
ner, so that we can know only the probability of events, nothing
more. Gone, now, was the clockwork universe of the previous few
centuries. Einstein, responding incredulously to quantum uncertainty,
once said, "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world."
No, God doesn't. But He can be full of surprises, and some of His
most unexpected ones appear in the topic for this quarter—the book
of Jonah, which on the surface seems filled with the uncertainty and
surprise of the quantum realm, though, in fact, it is based on a
certitude more solid and constant than the physics of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe.
First, there's Jonah, a prophet who refuses to accept his call—
hardly the usual biblical paradigm, to be sure. Though a Daniel he
isn't, a prophet he, nevertheless, is: "He restored the coast of Israel
from the entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain, according to
the word of the Lord God of Israel, which he spake by the hand of
his
servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet,
which was of Gathhepher"
(2 Kings 14:25, emphasis supplied). This is the same Jonah, son of
Amittai (hard as it, at times, might be to believe), whom we'll be
following for the next few months.
Next, this prophet flees from the Lord in a boat (A prophet fleeing
the Lord?), only to have the Lord send a storm that threatens to sink
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